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and had already shipped out…” She lifted an elegant shoulder, and with the gesture the fur slipped away from her throat. “It was the best I could do.”
    “But you never told me.”
    “I didn’t tell anyone. I couldn’t. You’d already joined the damned army to avoid jail, Stuart was dead, and…I guess I just had to fight this one alone.” Burrowing deeper in the lynx, she sighed. “I screwed up. What can I say?”
    Daegan’s emotions were galloping in every direction, but he took the reins, pulled them back in, and tried to look at this situation objectively. As he always did. This time, it was damned near impossible. “What if I said there’s no way I’m ever gonna believe you?”
    “But you do, Daegan; I can see it in your eyes.”
    Another song was playing, a faster one, and some brave couples were twirling around the dance floor, laughing, talking, going on as if the world hadn’t stopped on its axis. Daegan rubbed his chin, felt two days’ worth of stubble and tried to ignore the roiling in his stomach, the sickness that wanted to consume him with the knowledge that he and his cousin…oh God. “Why are you telling me this now?”
    “That’s the worst part,” she said with a sigh. “It was hard, you understand. Damned hard to tell Robert Sullivan III that his only daughter was pregnant and unmarried. Not that the old man had many aspirations for me, but since Stu was dead…” Her voice, filled with pain, drifted away, and for a few seconds she followed it, as if lost in the swirl of lies and heartache that she’d lived with for fifteen years. Suddenly she sniffed, blinked hard, and pursed her lips. “Well, I was all they had left and the scandal was too much for the family to bear. You understand, of course.”
    Only too well. The rich, blue-blooded Sullivans abhorred the least suggestion of impropriety even though their family was riddled with dirty little secrets, deception, and hypocrisy.
    Her lips trembled though she tried to smile. “Just think how bad it would have been if they’d guessed the truth—that my cousin was the father? That the bastard sired yet another bastard.”
    “Stop it!” Daegan whispered harshly. His stomach clenched in pain.
    “Okay, that was a low blow.” She stared at her near-empty glass. “I’m sorry. Anyway, Mother and Daddy and I finally agreed about something. We all just wanted the baby to disappear—to make sure that no ripple of scandal disturbed the Sullivan waters, so they concocted some story for their friends—about me going away to Europe on some kind of exotic cruise, I think, then Daddy moved me in with an elderly woman who lived in this dive of an apartment on the Cape. She was a grandma type and talked all the time—drove me nuts. Dad hired some lawyer acquaintance in a small firm to handle the legal part. The guy, a lawyer named Tyrell Clark, owed Daddy a huge favor and promised to keep his mouth shut. The adoption was private, and I never saw my, our son—well, not after the delivery room.”
    She paused and smiled sadly. “I know this sounds schmaltzy, but that experience of actually giving birth…” Her gaze touched his briefly, and he remembered her as the younger fun-loving girl he’d first met before years and experience had taught her to become brittle. “It was…the most incredible experience of my life. I can’t…will never be able to describe the feeling.” She managed a small, fleeting grin. Tiny red veins showed in her eyes as she struggled against tears.
    “But it was an impossible situation,” she continued, her speech sounding rehearsed, as if she’d repeated it to herself a thousand times over. “It would have ruined my life to keep him, so I gave him away and I thought it was over. There was no reason to tell you. As I said, no one knows you’re the father. Yet.”
    He leaned back, his head propped up by the back of the booth. She could be lying. Bibi was a consummate liar, but why contact him now?